Just Church (6)

In our last instalment of this book, we left off talking about ideologies ... secular ideologies, and particularly the kind of beliefs that have given rise to the Social Justice ideology that’s nowadays making heavy inroads in many local churches. Though the love of a humanistic ideology goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel, there are a few new twists in present case. Some of these twists were introduced by a guy named G.W.F. Hegel, who believed that all history is like a great “god” with its own will, direction and trajectory, and that by releasing the power of this great “History” by busting the shackles of the status quo, we would have inevitable moral and social progress.

We left off last time with Hegel’s much more famous disciple, Karl Marx, who was going to take things to a whole new level, and eventually was to become the true father of the modern Social Justice movement ... even for those who’ve never yet heard of Karl Marx. (So toxic are bad ideas that they often continue to infect us long after their founders are pushing up daisies.)

Why do we need to know all this? Because some of the later “fruit” of the movement can look good from an unsuspicious Christian perspective. Social Justice often comes to us in the guise of kindness, fairness, equality, sharing, humility, and other virtues that any good Christian should admire. Unless we realize just how poisonous this ideology is at its root, it’s all too easy for us to suppose that a few concessions, a little giving-of-place, a bit of sharing of the limelight and the agenda can pacify the Social Justice advocates and reconcile them to us. But when we better understand the thinking and objectives that actually power the movement, their profound disharmony with Christian truth, and the hidden dangers this ideology contains, we are much better equipped to understand who and how to resist it.

So let’s pick up our story where we left off. Who is Karl Marx, and what did he do?

Chapter 2: From Among Your Own Selves (continued)

Old Marxism

Marx the Man

We should know something about Marx himself, if only because he’s been so greatly admired and so widely influential in the 20th and 21st centuries, and because it’s with him that the modern phase of our story begins. Karl Marx was an Englishman, living during the Industrial Revolution. He was Jewish by birth, but had no patience for those traditions or for Christianity either. He was not a worker: his family was upper middle class, which enabled Marx to live practically his whole life simply by draining the family fortune or by sponging off admirers like Engels. For a man obsessed with the suffering of the industrial lower classes, he had little enough exposure to them; Christian historian Paul Johnson notes, “So far as we know, Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in his entire life.” But he had ongoing encounters with a member of the industrial lower classes; his housekeeper, whom he impregnated and who yielded him a son he disowned.

So much for his love for humankind. Marx despised the people below him; and in his estimation, that was practically everyone. He was famous for his bouts of temper and blind rages. He did not like to be crossed, thwarted or denied in any way. For fun he wrote remarkably spiteful poetry, with lines like “With Satan I have struck my deal”, and “I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind.” Lovely stuff.

Marx and History

Of course, the man’s character doesn’t determine whether or not what he said was good or right; but there’s enough independent evidence to say that Marx created the most homicidal ideology in the history of the world. He penned such works as Das Kapital, his diatribe against capitalism and, with Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party itself. It has been conservatively estimated that in the last century, regimes professing Marx’s creed have killed well over 100 million people — far more than all other ideologies combined, by orders of magnitude. There simply has never been a more deadly belief system on the face of the earth. Nor has any proved more likely to cause economic and social ruin, as well. There is to date no truly Communist country on the face of the earth that has not ended up in disaster: Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, North Korea, and so on. The fruit from the Marxist tree is rotten without exception.

That was not what Marx set out to do though. Quite the opposite: like Hegel, he believed that history is teleological and progressive. The future he foresaw for the human race was a heaven-on-earth one, not the sort of dystopian nightmare that actually was to come. He believed that history was inevitably sweeping us all toward a scenario that he called “the triumph of the proletariat” that would be followed by “the classless society”. In such a society the Communist government would run everything, owning all the means of production of everything; and everybody would be economically equal, each having exactly what he needed and nobody lacking anything. It would be the best secular arrangement a country or a globe could actually have, he thought.

He expected the bloody revolution necessary to produce such a thing would break out anytime, just as soon as the oppressive nature of capitalism had reached its peak; but revolution never came, and this made Marx very angry. Looking around, he decided that one of the causes of this had to be “religion” (by which he understood primarily Christianity, and perhaps Judaism), because, he said, it teaches people to be content with their lot in this life, and thus keeps them from becoming angry enough to do anything about it and revolt. This is when he penned his famous line about religion being “the opium of the masses”. So Marx was no friend to faith, for sure.

On the ‘Wrong Side’

Marx saw Christianity as holding back the revolution needed to smash the status quo and allow the Communist utopia to emerge. You might say he saw it as inhibiting the natural trajectory of history, delaying the social justice that otherwise should be coming about.(1) In Marxian terms (to borrow a line from Barack Obama) they are “on the wrong side of history”. Of course, in order to be able to judge which is the wrong or right side of history, one already has to know where history is going. Marx thought he did, but he did not.

He had other problems in his theory than just Christianity. As things were to turn out, the people in Industrial Revolution England were not only too Christian to revolt, in many cases, but also too impressed with the potential of the new machines and technologies around them. As historian W.E. Houghton and others have so aptly said, the Victorian attitude to technology was two sided: they resented some of the changes and social effects it was producing, but were in love with its benefits and potential at the same time. There was not the heart for a national revolution in England the way there had been in France and would be again in Russia. Marx had read history, but read it wrong. Badly wrong. Capitalism wasn’t about to implode; it was about to explode on the world, changing the whole dynamic between lower and upper class in ways that Marx had never foreseen.

The Death of Marxism?

Given Marxism’s unparalleled record of wrong historical guesses and spectacular and deadly practical failure, you might expect it would have long ago been recognized for the complete disaster it is. But not so. If anything, Marxism is more widespread than at any time in history … and the disconnect between its reputation and its real effects really needs some explaining. Why, in spite of all, would it remain so popular, so manifestly appealing to human nature, and so capable of reappearing in new forms, long after its disastrous fruit has become obvious?

To answer, I point to this intersection of three impulses in godless man that we discovered at Babel.

1/ Collectivization

Firstly, Marxism is the latest and greatest rationale for collectivization. Like no creed before, it promises the utopian dream of unlimited human potential, provided we all get together in the same project. The natural man believes this lie: it’s his only alternative to repentance and faith in God, so he clings to it with desperate fervor.

You might wonder why sinful, selfish men would ever agree to subdue their individuality to the collective: but there’s really no mystery there. Man needs power. The power he has alone is clearly insufficient to render to him what he wants, and he knows it. Joining with others is a practical measure, not one born out of love. And when the revolution has been achieved, selfish man is ready to demand whatever he thinks might be his fair share, and in response, the Marxist regime is ready to devour its own children. We can see this in every case of Marxist states: that the achieving of power is shortly followed by denouncements of its own citizens, stripping of property, purges, prison camps and a regime of suspicion, accusation and elimination of dissenters. But all this is far away; and the budding Marxist is too preoccupied with the heady thought of success to recognize the inevitability that the revolution will eat him next.

2/ Reconstruction of Past and Future

Secondly, though, Marxism is uniquely powerful in this way: it not only calls for collectivism, but offers a totally reconstructed way of seeing everything in history and everything yet to come, and promises that history itself will usher us forward toward heaven-on-earth. It offers an ideology to unify. This appeal goes right to the rebellious heart of human nature, and allows godless man to persist in his faith in the future. It offers him hope.

Why does a man who believes that this life is all there is, and who is centered in himself care about the future? I think the answer is that he doesn’t. His interest in it is purely in the patina of unselfishness and progressiveness that speaking of the future imparts to the present. To be sure, some people do also console themselves that they are becoming “agents of history” and “establishing a legacy”, which are the closest ideas to immortality that a secular man knows. But I think these motives are not so close to his heart as is the legitimacy that “being on the right side of history” or “making the world a better place for all” give to his present ambitions.

3/ Technological Salvation

Thirdly, Marxism holds up the promise of technology — not merely of machines and inventions (though of those as well), but of new economic and political techniques, a whole set of new magical strategies that promise to fulfill every human need without toilsome work, and will deliver to him the happiness and freedom from struggle for which the human heart longs.

Seen this way, Marxism is really a new theology. When we get to its later child, Social Justice ideology, we will see this in more detail. But it’s a package of all kind of things the human heart craves: a rationale of belonging and solidarity, an account of original sin, a kind of collective redemption, an eschatological hope for the future — and all with no necessity whatsoever of us bowing to God.

But we have gone on long enough about the past, and we need now to bring our history to a close. We have left Marxism at the point at which it appeared, and then quickly rendered itself impossible for any reasonable and historically informed person (let alone any moral person) to believe. It could have died when Marx’s prediction of an uprising among the industrial poor of England failed to materialize, or when his predicted revolution, which Marx claimed required industrialism, happened instead as an uprising in pre‑industrial, largely feudal Russia. Or it could have died on the abundant human rights disasters it produced throughout the 20th century. But it did not. It has been kept alive. And that story needs to be told too.

We will tell it next week.

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(1) This is why even today, for Marxists, destruction is seen as positive and creative. When looters in Seattle or Kenosha burn down a Target store or a Walmart and loot it, it’s dubbed a “mostly peaceful protest”, a reasonable act of political action, because such businesses are elements of the status quo — and all elements of the status quo are a problem to the Marxist aspirations for the triumph of the Just Society they envision.